Restraining Government in America and Around the World

The European Superstate Continues to Metastasize

Insanity is sometimes defined as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. On this basis the Euro-statists are clinically over the edge. They keep centralizing more power in Brussels and then they complain that European economies remain stagnant. On this basis, the new EU President must have escaped from the sanitarium, because he is asking for “economic government.” This means, not surprisingly, more power for Brussels to harmonize and regulate in hopes of creating the imaginary nirvana of a competitive social model. But I have to admire the perseverance of the “federalists,” as they are known. Every time they expand power, such as the recent Lisbon Treaty (basically a sanitized version of the statist EU constitution), they claim that they don’t intend to push for more centralization. Yet the ink is barely dry on one agreement before they start pushing for more powers. You would think European citizens would wake up to this boy-who-cried-wolf scam, but since the “European project” is fundamentally anti-democratic, most of them have ceased paying attention.

The European Union’s new president, Herman Van Rompuy, is calling for an “economic government” for the bloc, with closer policy coordination and financial incentives for good performers. …”Whether it is called coordination of policies or economic government,” only the European nations working are “capable of delivering and sustaining a common European strategy for more growth and more jobs,” he underlined. …The evocation of a European “economic government” will please France which has lobbied in this direction for years without success. …Thursday’s summit will also will also prepare the ground for a new EU economic strategy, focussing on investing in research, innovation and the green economy. This will replace the bloc’s Lisbon Strategy launched in 2000. The ambitious Lisbon Strategy was supposed to make Europe’s economy the most competitive and dynamic in the world. It failed to do so and Van Rompuy was happy to bury it. …For Van Rompuy it the matter is urgent and strikes at the very heart of the European project. …”Our structural growth rate is not high enough to create jobs and sustain our social model,” he warned.